Celebrating Yellowstone Park

This post was written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Reference Archivist

As a previous blog post has explained, Yellowstone National Park was established by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was the first National Park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world. So we’re celebrating  by sharing these stunning images taken by photographer William Henry Jackson.

Jackson took these photographs as part of the Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey of the Territories, headed by geologist F.V. Hayden.  They were published in 1873; the library holds a copy of the volume: Photographs of the Yellowstone National Park and views in Montana and Wyoming territories.